Millions of BlackBerry users cut off for third day

LONDON Oct 12 Millions of BlackBerry users
around the world were left without text communication services
for a third day on Wednesday as Research in Motion
struggled to fix what it said was a switching failure in its
private network.

Users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India suffered
patchy email service and no access to browsing and messaging,
ratcheting up negative sentiment towards a company already
losing market share to Apple and Samsung .

RIM, which had said on Tuesday that services had returned to
normal, said later the problems had actually spread beyond EMEA
and India to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

"The messaging and browsing delays ... were caused by a core
switch failure within RIM's infrastructure," it said. "As a
result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now
working to clear that backlog and restore normal service."

The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept
north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put
on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.

"It's a blow upon a bruise. It comes at a bad time," said
Richard Windsor, global technology specialist at Nomura.

"One possibility could be that it encourages client
companies to look more at other options such as allowing users
to connect their own devices to the corporate server and save
themselves the cost of buying everyone a BlackBerry."

Many companies, no longer seeing the need to pay to be
locked into RIM's secure proprietary email service, have already
begun allowing employees to use alternative smartphones,
particularly Apple's iPhone, for corporate mail.

RIM has made inroads into the youth market attracted by its
free BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service, partially compensating
for its losses in the corporate market. But new products like
its PlayBook tablet computer have been poorly received.

Following a dismal set of quarterly results and a plunge in
its share price, some investors are now calling for a break-up,
sale or change of management at the company.

Increasingly frustrated users tweeted their frustration on
Wednesday, while RIM's own official Twitter feed was last
updated on Tuesday night, saying problems were being resolved
and it was sorry for the inconvenience.

Veteran British entrepreneur Alan Sugar, who founded
electronics company Amstrad in 1968, tweeted: "In all my years
in IT biz, I have never seen such an outage as experienced by
Blackberry. I can't understand why it's taking so long to fix."

Some customers used humour to deal with the situation. One
joke making the rounds on Twitter said: "What did the one BBM
user say to the other? Nothing."

Trending Stories

Sponsored Topics

Reuters is the news and media division of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is the world's largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms. Learn more about Thomson Reuters products: